Real-time data for dynamic business decisions ⏰📈

YPS Admin | 28th August 2018

Big data. Data mining. GDPR. Data is the hottest buzzword in business. But the truth is, leveraging the wrong kind of data could harm your parking operations more than it helps. You need to work in real time to stay ahead.

Modern businesses are fast-paced. They need to deliver high quality service, at real-time speed, in order to satisfy their customers. To achieve this, management must harness the power of instant data and predictive analytics and ensure that they are immediately responsive to the changing climate of their car parks.

Historic data alone won’t do. 

Worst case scenario? You and your team are gathering data from multiple fragmented sources, managed by a number of business software programs. Middle manager Joe gets called away to fix an issue with one of your barriers. Your intern forgets the login details for the pre-book parking system – again. You’re expending hours of valuable labour, but by the time any information reaches your desk, it’s hours, days or even weeks out of date. 

You plug it all into a spreadsheet and perform a confused, perhaps even frenzied analysis – there’s so much of it! What does it even really mean? 

Pressing on regardless, you draw your conclusions and make strategy recommendations to the marketing team (after calling the hardware company about your malfunctioning barriers).

The problem is, your solutions are already out of date. Wimbledon’s over and the summer sales are sold out. So that untimely price raise has lost you hundreds of customers.

Best case scenario? You’ve got a reliable customer base of commuters, and the situation in your car park changes little with the seasons. You’re not actively doing any damage. But you’re still barely improving on the results you had before data was in fashion. 

To optimise your business strategy, you need to make your data useful again. 

Accurate analysis of the right kind of data can make any company smarter – including your parking management team. 

Current, relevant, reliable data empowers you to make intelligent business decisions, cutting costs, improving organisational efficiency and reducing the reoccurrence of operational problems. Data isn’t useful today if it’s not in real time, in one place

Chances are, you already have the capability to harvest all the data you need. Your online reservation provider gave you a login to their handy portal; so did your enforcement partner, your mobile payment company, and just about everyone else whose technology you use. 

Real potential lies in turning several snapshots of unrelated data into one big picture. 

Streaming disparate data sources into a centralised system allows you to visualise how the cogs of your business work together to drive the overall machine. Taking a holistic view also allows you to identify what data really matters: focussing your analysis on key points of potential value minimises ineffective labour. 

ParkMaven’s Smart Dashboard was designed to do just this. 

The Smart Dashboard pulls together data from your on-site enforcement solutions, access control systems, PMS, RMS and online marketing channels. Providing a single real-time connection between all of the above, the dashboard presents your key metrics in one place – with only one login to remember. 

We didn’t forget the most exciting part of real-time data, either. 

Predictive analytics allows managers to pre-empt future trends and emerging problems in the car park. You have the power to implement your response before a challenge grows too difficult to contain. 

Forecasting the predicted demand for your parking inventory permits you to adjust marketing and pricing strategies to maximise revenue long before profits threaten to drop. 

The Smart Dashboard lets you upload historic data as well as logging new information at the rate it appears, because the ‘bigger’ your data, the more nuanced your insights can be. High volumes of data give you the ability to accurately track patterns in occupancy as well as the performance of various solutions and strategies. Ensuring your data is up-to-the-minute means that you can plan better for the coming season, instead of ‘strategising for yesterday’. 

Real-time data alerts you to sudden changes, giving you a valuable opportunity to react with the right decision for your car park. The Smart Dashboard takes the work out of adjusting your analyses by updating predictive insights automatically. 

In short, choosing a powerful software solution is unquestionably the best way to capture real-time data. The key advantage of the Smart Dashboard is the ability to create dynamic pricing strategies to maximise both occupancy and profit. 

Instant data is not merely helpful, but necessary to compete for demanding drivers in a dynamic parking market.